The Geography of American Poverty

Is There a Need for Place-Based Policies?

Mark D. Partridge and Dan S. Rickman

Publication Year: 2006

Partridge and Rickman explore the wide geographic disparities in poverty across the United States. Their focus on the spatial dimensions of U.S. poverty reveals distinct differences across states, metropolitan areas, and counties and leads them to consider why antipoverty policies have succeeded in some places and failed in others.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Table of Contents

Acknowlegements

We wish to thank many people for this project, including Josefin Kihlberg,
Rose Olfert, Jamie Partridge, Steven Miller, and Stephen Schultz. We appreciate
the help of two anonymous reviewers, and we are grateful to Tim Bartik
and Kevin Hollenbeck...

1 Spatial Concentration
of American Poverty

Concern about the well-being of the least fortunate Americans has
ebbed and flowed over the last century. The New Deal initiatives of
the 1930s stimulated interest in helping those hit hardest by the Great
Depression. During...

2 Recent Spatial Poverty
Trends in America

The national poverty trends depicted in Chapter 1 obscure remarkable
geographical diversity in the poverty rate outcomes across the
United States. This diversity extends beyond the familiar broad regional
patterns of high poverty rates in the South and comparatively low
rates in the upper Midwest. For one thing, poverty varies greatly within
broad regions. Even...

3 Regional Economic
Performance and Poverty

Chapter 2 illustrated the spatial concentration and persistence of
poverty in the United States. In many areas, labor market rewards plus
transfer payments left significant portions of the population below the
federal poverty line. Labor market rewards reflect both the degree of
participation in paid work...

4 An Empirical Analysis
of State Poverty Trends

Federal welfare reform and the acceleration of economic growth
happened in close proximity. The timing led to competing claims that
each was responsible for declining poverty in the late 1990s. Some held
that the economy was primarily responsible for the reduction in welfare
caseloads, while others...

5 State Economic Performance,
Welfare Reform, and Poverty

To provide more context and an in-depth understanding of the
nexus between poverty, the economy, and welfare reform, we examine
four states as case studies. The four states are Alabama, Minnesota,
New Jersey, and Washington—one from each of the four major census
regions. We chose these states...

6 County Employment
Growth and Poverty

In previous chapters we found that economic growth reduces poverty
at the state and national levels, especially when U.S. unemployment
rates are low. This supports the belief that a “rising tide lifts all
boats,” particularly approaching high tide, when the tide reaches the
boats stranded on the beach. We found less evidence that the 1996 federal
welfare reform affected...

7 Poverty in Metropolitan America

Chapter 2 illustrated the wide variation in poverty rates across
U.S. counties—both across metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties
and across central-city and suburban counties. Chapter 6 assessed the
causes of poverty rates using regression analysis for all U.S. counties.
While this analysis discovered a multitude of findings for the “typical”
U.S. county, it may have...

8 Poverty in Rural America

Chapter 7 showed that larger population and other characteristics
help produce different poverty rate patterns and dynamics for metropolitan
areas than for the nation as a whole. Low population densities and
differing demographic characteristics also suggest that nonmetropolitan
patterns may vary from national patterns...

9 How to Win the Local Poverty War

After weakening in the 1980s, the link between economic growth
and poverty reduction tightened again during the record expansion of
the 1990s, particularly near the end of the decade. Yet strong economic
performance also coincided with several public policy initiatives, including
efforts to reform...

Appendix A:Derivation of the County
Poverty Rate Empirical Model

References

The Authors

Mark D. Partridge is the C. William Swank Chair of Rural-Urban Policy
at Ohio State University and a professor in the Department of Agricultural,
Environmental, and Development Economics. Prior to that, he was the Canada
Research Chair in the New Rural Economy at the University of Saskatchewan.
His scholarly publications...

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